With a house-edge of 0.5%, you can gamble $10,000 and only lose $50 on average. If done right, gambling can actually be extremely cheap. Eg, no further gambling until after the next show/meal Once a session has ended, have a cooling off period. The longer your session drags on, the lower the likelihood of getting to $2X Bet large enough that you will get to $2X or $0 in a short/moderate period of time. If at any point during the session, you get to $2X or $0 in chips, end the session immediately and cash out everything. Always start off each session with a fixed $X in chips, even if you're flush from previous winnings Which is guaranteed to happen 100% of the time even if the house-edge was 0.Īn approach that I've found to be useful, and have personally used in Vegas: The problem is exactly as you stated - people don't have a defined exit-strategy, and their implicit exit-strategy is to keep playing till they lose everything.

And yet, most people lose far more than predicted by the odds. If you simply play the pass-line and free-odds on craps, the house edge is extremely small. And these days, all you have to do is pull out your phone to place a trade or a bet. Gambling is the only vice where you can lose billions. You can only spend so much money on drugs and sex. Or they are there for fun but they lose a bunch of hands in a row and tilt and now they're betting everything on a longshot to win it all back and win some because they dont want to self-identify as a 'loser'. Some people are driving to the slots _because_ they are depressed. The idea that people are rational is also absurd. The behavioral factors are bigger than the house edge. Essentially they are flipping coins for infinite time and just waiting to get a bunch of tails in a row, which is inevitable.

They scale the bets as their bankroll grows. They rarely cash out when up but they always lose when they go bust. Then they start flipping coins, and often they keep doing this until they go bust. If they dont, then that number is their bank account balance. When people go to vegas for a weekend, they might have a number in their head they are willing to gamble. That the house has a small edge only tells a small part of the story.

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